Yet another newbie question - standard or built-in methods

[Peter Otten]

Kamus of Kadizhar wrote:

> OK, I've been playing with the snippets of code posted earlier.
> 
> Among them are things like
> 
> allmovies[movie] = allmovies.get(movie, 0) + 1
> 
>  From reading the docs, I've gathered that the '.get(xxx,yyy)' part is a
> method that operates on the dictonary allmovies.  (Sorry if I have the
> terminology wrong).
> 
> But nowhere can I find a list of 'standard' or 'built-in' methods, or
> methods that can be used with various variable classes.  What exactly
> does 'get' do?  This seems to be so basic to python that it's not
> explained anywhere, but that's no help to me.... Is there a list with
> explanations somewhere?  I've been through the tutorials and guides, and
> all just start using these with no explanation of what they do and how
> they work.
> 
> Maybe I've missed it somewhere; just point me to the right FM, so I can
> RTFM.
> 
> help is no help:
> 
> help> get
> no Python documentation found for 'get'
> 
> So what's a newbie to do?

Raymond Hettinger has already pointed you to the relevant part of the
documentation. I will add that help *is* helpful. You just need to provide
some context:

>>> allmovies = {}
>>> help(allmovies.get)

will show you a short explanation of the dict.get() method. 
Unfortunately help({}) does not come up with the help for dictionaries, but
it does mention the class (dict), so that the next step should work to your
satisfaction:

>>> help(allmovies) # not very informative

>>> help(dict) # nice

help() has the additional benefit of working for third party (or your own)
code that provides docstrings:

>>> def foo(bar):
...     "Reliably foo any bar you care to mention"
...
>>> help(foo)

Or, more likely:

>>> import otten.statistics 
>>> help(otten.statistics) # and old module, hope I threw in some doc :-)

Peter